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From left to right, Riley Sanville, Bruce Reagan, Tyler Lucas, and Curtis Bonneau explain how an anemometer, or wind speed sensor, works while their teacher Zarah Savoie holds up their model and their classmates Jeremy Lapan-Ward and Ben Longley look on. Photo by Nathalie Gagnon-Joseph

copyright the Chronicle June 3, 2015

by Nathalie Gagnon-Joseph

LOWELL — Sixth-grade students at the Lowell Graded School presented a synopsis of their weather unit Tuesday night.

The unit is special because students used a meteorological tower they have in the schoolyard to learn how to predict the weather from data the tools on the tower provide.

Originally, Green Mountain Power used the tower to measure wind in preparation for the wind project here. The utility donated the tower to the school.….To read the rest of this article, and all the Chronicle‘s stories, subscribe:

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Rita and Paul Martin at their home on the Eden Road in Albany. The Lowell Mountain turbines dominate the view behind them, though the camera used in this photo was barely able to capture them. Photo by Chris Braithwaite

by Chris Braithwaite

ALBANY — Jim and Kathy Goodrich have a nice home with a porch along the entire west side that overlooks acres of neatly trimmed lawn and, about a mile away, the long, sinuous ridgeline known as Lowell Mountain.

Now that view is dominated by the 21 towers of the Lowell wind project, their blades reaching 460 feet high. And the house is for sale at a discounted price.

“What I came here for is gone,” said Ms. Goodrich, a Wolcott native who worked for IBM in Chittenden County and then spent ten years with her husband in a landscaping business.

“This was going to be where I spent the rest of my life — quiet, peaceful, relaxed,” Ms. Goodrich continued. “But I can’t stay here.”

One of the features their home has lost is the quiet, the couple says.

“Sometimes they’re really loud,” Ms. Goodrich said. In one hot spell, with the bedroom windows open and two fans running, she recalls, “I could hear them over everything. It was some kind of roar.”

He suspects that the turbines often exceed the limits imposed when the state Public Service Board (PSB) gave the project its certificate of public good. Mr. Goodrich sounds unconvinced by Green Mountain Power’s claim that its turbines have remained within those limits — 45 decibels outside, 35 inside — 99 percent of the time since they began to spin in late 2012.

Ms. Goodrich thinks the noise limits miss the point.

“I don’t doubt that most of the time they’re in compliance,” she said Monday. “But to me, those guidelines are too much for people to handle, hour after hour after hour.”

The couple is not sure whether the turbines are affecting their health. Mr. Goodrich recently experienced blade flicker for the first time, as the sun set behind the turbines and cast their moving shadows into the house.

Jim and Kathy Goodrich on their front porch, with Sophie. Photo by Chris Braithwaite

“That really irritated me,” he said. As a young man, he said, he couldn’t go into a disco club because of the effect strobe lights had on him. “That night it really freaked me,” he said of the flicker.

As for the noise, Mr. Goodrich said, “I’ve got an idea it’s affecting my health, but I don’t know. I know it has an effect on our talking to each other. I get cranky. She gets cranky.”

“It’s frustrating,” Ms. Goodrich agreed. “It’s beyond our control. I can ask him to turn the TV down, but they don’t listen up there,” she added, gesturing to the turbines.

Underlying the couple’s personal concerns is their anger about the project’s environmental impact.

“For me it’s about what they did to the top of the mountain,” Ms. Goodrich said. “I’m a Vermonter. I respect what we have here. Now that it’s there it’s the interrupted views, the noise, the stress it’s brought into our lives. It’s everything.

“I wouldn’t have any problem in the world with green power,” she continued. “But it seems that they took away more green than they’ll ever give back.”

The third member of the household, a small dog named Sophie, “gets really skittish when the turbines are noisy,” Ms. Goodrich said. “At times I can’t get her to take a walk down the driveway.”

Molly Two lives just down the hill, where Goodrich Road meets the Eden Road. The big dog sticks close to Paul Martin if he takes her outside when the turbines are running. She has become gun shy, and she’s started going to the bathroom on the floor of the Martin house.

The Martins’ horses were spooked by the turbines at first, Mr. Martin said, but seem to have grown used to them now.

When the wind’s right they hear the turbines outside. Mr. Martin described the noise as “just a big rumble like a jet.”

“With a lot of that thud, thud thud,” his wife, Rita, added.

When he goes outside, Mr. Martin said, “my ears will start ringing to beat hell. They never did that before.”

As for Ms. Martin, he said, “She woke me up one night and said ‘My heart is pounding terrible.’ I could hear the thud thud from the towers.”

“We were told we wouldn’t hear them” by the people from Green Mountain Power, Mr. Martin said.

Since they’ve put an air conditioner in the bedroom the turbine noise doesn’t disturb their sleep, the Martins said, though they still hear them on some nights.

When they moved onto the Eden Road in 1974, their place was at the end of the road. Now, the Martins say, people wanting to view the turbines generate considerable traffic past their home.

They say they’ve thought about moving, but are not sure they could sell their homestead.

“Who’d buy it?” Ms. Martin asked with a shrug.

“What most bothers me is the destruction it’s done on top of the mountain,” Mr. Martin said.

“Paul’s taken both our kids up the mountain,” before the turbines arrived, his wife said. “Thank God he did, too. It will never be the same.”

Shirley and Don Nelson flank a sign that is common in their neighborhood. Photo by Chris Braithwaite

A bit closer to the turbines, at her home on the Bailey-Hazen Road, Shirley Nelson has a list of symptoms that have arrived since the wind project started spinning. She has a ringing in her ears, and sometimes worse.

“This morning it felt like a pin sticking in my ear,” she said Monday. “I have headaches, usually around my temples but sometimes like a band wrapped right around my head.

“Both Donny and I wake up in the middle of the night because it sounds like something coming out of the pillow,” she said, referring to her husband, Don. “I never said much about it, because I thought I was crazy.”

Then she found a research paper by Alec Salt, Ph.D., from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, entitled “Wind Turbines can be Hazardous to Human Health.”

He writes about very low frequency sound and infrasound, which wind turbines generate in turbulent winds. “Our measurements show the ear is most sensitive to infrasound when other, audible sounds are at low levels or absent,” Dr. Salt writes.

Thus infrasound can be most troublesome when other sounds are blocked by house walls or even a pillow, he continues. “In either case, the infrasound will be strongly stimulating the ear even though you will not be able to hear it.”

That can cause sleep disturbance, panic, and chronic sleep deprivation leading to high blood pressure, the paper says.

“Some days I am very tired,” Ms. Nelson wrote in an e-mail Monday. It is hard to stay awake on such days, she added, and “it is hard to concentrate and I find I am unable to do simple things like balancing a checkbook.”

The Nelsons routinely see turbine flicker in their home as the sun goes behind the towers. It sends shadows spinning slowly across their refrigerator, their floors and across the lawns outside.

“It’s just really annoying,” Ms. Nelson said.

Dislike of the turbines and their effects is not universal in the neighborhood. Albert and Esther Weber live a little west of the Martins on the Eden Road, just across the Lowell town line.

“I hear them, but they’re not offensive to me,” Mr. Weber said. “I figure the wind should do some good for a change. The wind ripped the roof off my house. It should make some electricity, and it should make our taxes go down.

“I love the windmills,” Ms. Weber said. “I’ve always loved windmills since I was a girl in school, and learned about Holland. When they said they were going to put some up here, I was thrilled.”

She likes to see the towers glowing on the mountain in the early morning light, and finds that the afternoon shadows flickering in the backyard “look kind of neat.”

Further down the road Carl Cowles said he hears the turbines almost all the time, and they bother him. “I think I hear them more at night than in the daytime,” Mr. Cowles added. “I do wake up, and I hear them. I don’t know exactly what woke me up.”

When he’s not traveling around the world on business, Kevin McGrath lives on the other side of the mountain on the Farm Road in Lowell. He recalls a visit from a friend, another Lowell resident who had voted in favor of the wind project. Mr. McGrath was complaining about the turbine noise.

“He said, ‘We’ll listen for the noise as soon as the jet plane goes away.’ I said, ‘That is the noise.’”

“It sounds like a plane that never lands,” he said. He measures the sound with a hand-held meter.

“At times it is under 45 decibels outside,” he reports. “You don’t have anything to say. This is the way it is.”

“People like myself, who have had the land for 20 or 25 years, aren’t used to this new intrusion into their lives. If you have a leaky faucet in your sink, is it below 35 decibels? Yes it is. But not being able to turn it off will drive you crazy. It’s an intrusion.”

Mr. McGrath has bombarded the Department of Public Service with complaints that the turbines have kept him and his guests awake at night. He’s currently asking Green Mountain Power (GMP) for detailed data about wind speed and other weather conditions, which he wants to pass on to his own, independent noise expert.

“They’re kind of waffling on that,” he said of GMP in a telephone interview Tuesday.

But Ms. Schnure didn’t say GMP would provide the data he’s seeking. Instead, she emphasized that the utility stands ready to test any home near the project, to see how much its structure reduces outside noise. Then the utility would put an outside meter near the house, to provide an approximation of turbine noise inside the home.

So far, she said, “no one has taken us up on the offer.”

GMP announced last week that in a test period from May 22 to June 5 its project did not exceed the PSB noise limits.

However, in two earlier test periods noise exceeded the limits for a total of just over four hours, the release said.

The PSB has scheduled a hearing for August 8 to decide what sanctions should be imposed on GMP for the violations.

The legal fight between Green Mountain Power (GMP) and Chronicle publisher and reporter Chris Braithwaite has shifted from criminal to civil court.

Defense attorney Phil White filed a civil complaint late last month alleging that GMP had violated his client’s civil rights when Mr. Braithwaite was arrested on December 5, 2011, for covering a wind protest on Lowell Mountain.

Mr. White charges that GMP and its agent on the site, David Coriell, “knew or should have known that Braithwaite had permission to be on the property and that, at the very least, misinformation provided by Coriell and GMP to law enforcement had caused Braithwaite to be wrongly taken into custody, arrested, and subsequently charged with and prosecuted for unlawful trespass.”

The civil complaint comes close on the heels of a ruling handed down by Judge Howard VanBenthuysen that dismissed a criminal charge of unlawful trespass brought against Mr. Braithwaite and forbids the state to bring the charges back at a later date.

In dismissing the case with prejudice, Judge VanBenthuysen noted that he failed to see how the state could bring back the charge against the journalist in light of the e-mails among GMP officials giving the press permission to be at the site.

After noting the e-mails only came into view as the case was about to go to trial, the judge wrote: “Consent is a key element of the offense, and GMP apparently consented to the presence of media at protests, and gave instructions that the media should not be arrested.”

In her brief to the court, Deputy State’s Attorney Sarah Baker argued against dismissing the charge with prejudice, saying the state could still make a case against Mr. Braithwaite by bringing Mr. Coriell, who has since left Vermont, back to testify.

The judge concluded, however, that was stretching the point, as it was unlikely that Mr. Coriell could give testimony that would rebut the evidence found in the e-mails.

“Under the circumstances this is the rare case in which a dismissal with prejudice is appropriate, given the late revelation of consent.”

The ruling was released on December 24 and the day after Christmas, December 26, Mr. White filed a civil complaint against GMP. Along with the complaint, Mr. White also asked the court to revise a protective order to return to GMP documents that were sealed when the criminal case was still active.

Mr. White argued in his brief that he wanted to retain the documents on the grounds they constitute evidence in the civil suit he is pursuing against GMP. If the court grants his request, the documents would be kept from public view until further court order.

The suit asks for compensatory damages in the amount of $22,530 (Mr. White’s fee for Mr. Braithwaite’s criminal defense) along with attorney’s fees and expenses in the civil case. The suit further alleges that Mr. Braithwaite’s civil rights were violated, and seeks punitive damages, which are characteristically sought as a deterrent.

In his discussion of the events leading up to his client’s arrest, Mr. White says that GMP anticipated Mr. Braithwaite’s arrival at the protest and spelled out a course of action for its agent at Lowell Mountain.

GMP officials, according to the complaint, “gave Coriell explicit directions to inform law enforcement that Chris Braithwaite and any other members of the working press who showed up to cover this protest had GMP’s consent to be there to cover this event and that they were not to be arrested.”

As it turned out, Mr. Braithwaite was the only reporter present at the site, and was arrested when he refused a police order to leave. Mr. White argues that after his client was arrested, GMP failed to step forward to explain their instructions to Mr. Coriell and reverse the arrest.

Their failure to do so, the attorney further argues, violated Mr. Braithwaite’s civil rights. The attorney said that Mr. Braithwaite, as a journalist, had written “fierce editorials opposing GMP’s commercial wind project” on Lowell Mountain.

“At all times material to this complaint GMP and its agents, including Coriell and Orleans County law enforcement officers have jointly participated in the planning and execution of arrests of protesters,” charges the complaint.

“GMP and/or Coriell were acting under the color of law and engaging in ‘state action’ when they maliciously gave the government false and misleading information with the purpose of causing the government to engage in false arrest and wrongful prosecution.”

Green Mountain Power did not respond Tuesday to a request for comment. Nor has the company filed a response in court to the complaint. When the possibility of a civil law suit was raised last month, a company spokesman told a reporter that any legal claim against Mr. Coriell would be frivolous.

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The Lowell Mountain wind towers as seen from Irish Hill. Photo by Bethany M. Dunbar

by Paul Lefebvre

copyright the Chronicle 12-12-2012

NEWPORT — A utility wind developer company that tried to do the right thing by the press appears to have shot itself in the foot when it allowed the arrest of a reporter and then failed to step forward and rectify an action contrary to company policy.

The Orleans County state’s attorney’s office last week dismissed a criminal charge of unlawful trespass brought against Chris Braithwaite, a reporter for and publisher of the Chronicle in Barton.

Mr. Braithwaite, who had been spearheading his paper’s coverage of the wind project on Lowell Mountain and the controversy it triggered, went to the site on December 5, 2011, to cover a demonstration that protesters had scheduled for the morning.

Police intervened and arrested six protesters, who became known as the Lowell Six. A jury found each of them guilty of unlawful trespass this summer. Mr. Braithwaite also was arrested despite his claims he only had gone to the site to cover the demonstration as a reporter.

When news of his case’s dismissal was announced last week, Mr. Braithwaite, 68, of West Glover, released the following statement:

“On the day after my arraignment on a charge of unlawful trespass, I wrote that I believed my conduct on Lowell Mountain on December 5, 2011, satisfied the dictates of common sense and the ethics of journalism. What remained was the daunting task of demonstrating that it was also within the law. That task came to a successful conclusion today.”

Dismissal came as the case was preparing to go to trial and after defense attorney Phil White subpoenaed internal e-mails that passed back and forth among officials of Green Mountain Power Company (GMP.)

The documents show that GMP intended to give Mr. Braithwaite and other reporters access to its Lowell Mountain site, where protesters were demonstrating against the construction of a 21-turbine wind project.

“Does anyone know what happened,” asked Robert Dostis, a GMP official who works with communities and who was responding to colleagues about an editorial against the arrest.

To GMP’s site manager at Lowell Mountain, he went on express surprise that an arrest had occurred.

“Frankly, I don’t understand why Chris was arrested since you gave exact instructions that he not be,” he wrote in an e-mail dated December 10.

A day later, a second official struck a similar note.

“I think now we have to put an end to the notion we tried to stop the media, when we simply did not,” wrote a GMP consultant Stephen Terry in an internal e-mail sent six days after the arrest.

He then repeated a question asked earlier by the company’s public relations officer: “Did the leadership instruction not to arrest CB just not get relayed fast enough Monday morning?”

While release of the e-mails helped to end the criminal charge, they may have opened a new chapter in the case.

Attorney White said Monday he had asked for an apology from GMP as well as compensation for expenses and legal fees that came to $22,330.

“Had Green Mountain Power disclosed this information to the State Attorney’s Office promptly, Chris never would have had to undergo a year facing criminal charges,” wrote Mr. White in an e-mail.

“Instead, GMP sat on its hands and did nothing, absolutely nothing.”

Mr. White said he hoped that GMP would “do the right thing” by apologizing and paying Mr. Braithwaite.

But that appeared unlikely Tuesday.

GMP Public Relations Officer Dorothy Schnure said that it was Mr. Braithwaite’s refusal to leave the site that caused him to be arrested. And once an arrest occurred, it was out of GMP’s hands.

“It’s not our case, it’s the state’s,” she said, adding later: “While we had hoped he wouldn’t be arrested, that’s what played out.”

She declined to comment Tuesday if the company had received Mr. White’s request of GMP to pay for his client’s legal fees and expenses.

In an e-mail later in the day Ms. Schnure stated:

“Frankly, the proposition that David Coriell acted inappropriately and that it gives grounds for a legal claim by Chris Braithwaite is frankly frivolous.”

On Monday Judge Howard VanBenthuysen, who presided over the case, released some of the documents, which had been sealed under an agreement between the defense and prosecution.

The judge noted they had been submitted in support of the defense motion to dismiss with prejudice and were now part of the public record.

He also said he would not rule on the motion to dismiss the case with prejudice until the state had a chance to respond. If a case is dismissed without prejudice, the state can bring it again. He set a deadline of December 26 for the prosecution to respond.

Deputy State’s Attorney Sarah Baker said in an interview Tuesday she would file a response opposing the motion because there is still evidence available that would enable the state to win the case.

She said her motion would also explain why the state dismissed the charge, adding that her office did not want to inconvenience a witness and former employee of GMP who has since moved from Vermont. Ms. Baker also said there were documents in the file that had not been unsealed and that would help the state prove its case, in the event it was brought back.

The documents that came to light this week indicated that the state’s dismissal may have hinged on the failure of a GMP employee at the scene on the day of the arrest to correctly inform police officers of the company’s policy toward arresting Mr. Braithwaite and any other journalists covering the protest.

As GMP officials scrambled to learn what had happened, David Coriell, its representative at the site during the protest, tried to explain to his bosses in two e-mails why the arrest had occurred.

The first e-mail sent on the day of the arrest stated: “Braithwaite and another woman stopped at the edge of the construction site and started taking pictures. Phil Brooks, the Orleans Co. Chief Deputy, asked Braithwaite and the woman to get back another 50 feet to the Nelson property. The woman complied. Braithwaite chose to stay. Brooks approached Braithwaite and after a short conversation he asked him to leave or come back and stand with those willing to be arrested. Braithwaite walked back and stood with those being arrested.”

In the second e-mail, dated December 11, Mr. Coriell told his bosses that the no-arrest instructions “didn’t get relayed to all the officers involved.

“That said, I know the Sheriff had no intention of arresting Chris. Chris actually arrested himself by physically walking back to the middle of the crane path.”

He went on to say that Mr. Braithwaite called the officer an expletive. The officer charged that the reporter had stepped “over a professional line.”

Ms. Schnure said Tuesday the scene that day at the site was confusing, with cell phones losing signal and people milling around. She called the arrest Tuesday “a breakdown in communications.”

Concerned that another protest at the mountain was coming, GMP officials huddled and considered what they should do about access and the press, and what instructions to give the police. An e-mail from Ms. Schnure to GMP managers on December 11 laid out a possible course of action.

“Dave confirm that sheriff will be there early if at all possible. Ensure sheriff knows media has permission to be there. Tell Sheriff we really don’t want any reporters arrested.”

Mr. Terry, the consultant, agreed, calling the proposed instructions “a good way to pre-empt another journalism arrest which was never our intent or purpose here.”

While it is still unclear how far the documents went in convincing the state to dismiss the charge, they did provide a picture of GMP managers working to ensure similar arrests of reporters would not occur at future demonstrations.

“We have to minimize the public and political fallout of decisions made on the mountain,” wrote Mr. Dostis in a December 10 e-mail.

“Arresting reporters will do more harm than good.”

Ms. Schnure said repeatedly Tuesday that it was Mr. Braithwaite’s actions that caused his arrest. And that he was not owed an apology by GMP.

Eric Gillard, the brother of one of the Lowell Six, holds a sign in front of the courthouse. Photo by Paul Lefebvre

by Paul Lefebvre

copyright the Chronicle 8-22-2012

NEWPORT — It took a jury of nine women and three men four hours to find wind opponents known as the Lowell Six guilty of unlawful trespass, following a one-day trial here in Superior Court.

The verdict appeared to reflect a trial in which a straight law and order issue trumped a disputed property boundary.

Conflicting testimony over the dispute may have confused the jurors as about an hour or so into their deliberation, they sent a note to the judge.

They wanted to know if there could be a legal owner when a property is in dispute. And if the dispute was still current.

Trial Judge Martin Maley complimented the quality of the questions, but ruled each irrelevant.

“Do the best you can based on the evidence you heard,” he instructed them.

Disputed property boundaries were the key to the defense case: If the state could not prove that the protesters were standing on property that was in the lawful possession of Green Mountain Power (GMP), then the defendants could not be convicted of unlawful trespass.

The prosecution argued that GMP was in lawful possession of the property, and that the protesters had broken the law when they refused to leave the land that had been posted by the company.

The trial was the first to be held involving protesters against the Lowell wind project that is being constructed by GMP.

Each of the six were arrested on December 5, 2011, when they refused police orders to leave posted property on Lowell Mountain while blocking the path of heavy construction vehicles.

Although the six presented their case as a group, the jury found each guilty as individuals.

Six more protesters are scheduled to be arraigned next month for a similar confrontation on the same mountain earlier this month.

Held Wednesday of last week, August 15, the trial was surprisingly silent on the underlying and highly charged issue that caused the defendants to break the law. Before the jury entered the courtroom, Judge Maley warned he would only allow limited testimony on why the defendants were on the land. And nothing, per se, on wind itself.

The jury, he said, knew what the case was about. “It’s not a secret to them.”

So wind remained the elephant in the room: the one everyone knew was there and agreed not to see.

Surprisingly, the only one to raise it as an issue was prosecutor Sarah Baker, when she sought to challenge the intent of the defense’s star witness, surveyor Paul Hannan of Calais, formerly of Holland and at one time a Kingdom legislator who served in the House.

Placed on the stand as an expert witness by defense attorney Kristina Michelsen, Mr. Hannan was prepared to provide the rock-bottom kind of testimony the defense needed to support its case.

Mr. Hannan testified that he had 31 years of experience as a surveyor and the credentials to qualify as an expert. The rules of evidence, however, say that either side can challenge an expert’s witness. And when her turn came, Ms. Baker proceeded vigorously.

First she asked Mr. Hannan about his association with Sterling College, and learned that during the years 1990 and 1991, he was one of the faculty members who accompanied students on three-to-four-day expeditions on Lowell Mountain.

The prosecutor pressed on. Did he have any prior knowledge of Don Nelson — who allowed the students to use his property and who also is in a property dispute with GMP concerning the boundary line between his land on the mountain and the adjourning site where the utility is constructing its wind project.

No, said Mr. Hannan.

Ms. Baker may have thought she had found a chink in the defense’s armor when she abruptly asked the witness if he had any association with any anti-wind group.

Instead, the question brought a prompt objection from attorney Michelsen, along with a few hisses and murmurs from the 35 or so spectators in the gallery, a largely anti-wind crowd.

Judge Maley sustained the objection and Ms. Baker sat down, taking with her any references that the industrial wind project on Lowell Mountain had anything to do with the case.

There was a stirring in the closing moments of the trial when one of the defendants, Dr. Ronald Holland, took the stand. The doctor’s name had surfaced earlier in the trial when Deputy Sheriff Phil Brooks testified for the state.

Of the ten protesters on the mountain that day, the deputy said he only knew Dr. Holland from previous personal and professional encounters. He went on to testify that about two weeks prior to the December 5 confrontation, he received a call at home from Dr. Holland. The doctor, according to the testimony, told the deputy he was going to the mountain that day to protest and wanted the deputy to arrest him.

“I informed him I was off duty and it wasn’t going to be me,” Deputy Brooks testified, adding that he passed what he characterized an “odd request” on to the State Police, who didn’t do anything either.

That testimony was before the jury when Dr. Holland took the stand late in the day. The 67-year-old resident of Irasburg told jurors that days prior to the confrontation with police, he had gone onto the site and measured with twine the distance where he believed Mr. Nelson’s property ended.

And on the day of the confrontation, he testified he went to the limit of that measured distance.

But in a question that had nearly everyone in the courtroom leaning forward on the edge of their seats, Ms. Michelsen asked the emergency room doctor why he had climbed to the top of Lowell Mountain on December 5, 2011.

He paused and bowed his head a moment before answering that he had gone there to “protest the taking of Don Nelson’s property.”

Defendant David Rodgers, 69, of Craftsbury followed Dr. Holland to the stand and testified that he too believed he was on the Nelson property when police moved in to arrest him.

He testified that Dr. Holland had tied a block of wood to the end of a string as a means of measuring the property’s boundary. And that he was “very careful not to” trespass on the land GMP is leasing to erect its 21-turbine wind plant.

The procession to the stand might have continued had not the prosecution agreed to stipulate that the remaining four defendants had followed the doctor’s lead.

But if the defense thought a protest over property rights could overturn the confrontation that followed, the jury saw it differently. Nor did any witness refute or challenge the deputy’s testimony over what happened that day.

Deputy Brooks testified he received a call around nine that morning from GMP, informing him that protesters were on the mountain blocking heavy equipment from working on the wind project. Police arrived roughly two hours later, and observed that the group was blocking cranes and big trucks.

“They were stopped on either side of where the defendants were,” he testified.

Deputy Brooks testified that prior to December 5, GMP had shown him a map of the project and its property boundaries. And when confronting the protesters, he said he gave everyone the opportunity to step back behind the property line between GMP and the Nelson farm.

Of the ten protesters, three complied with a police order to step aside. Six refused and were placed under what sounded like a gentleman’s arrest. The deputy said he chatted cordially with the defendants and discussed everything but the project going on around them.

“I limited myself to that,” said Deputy Brooks.

The biggest problem police encountered that day, the deputy added, was finding a way to transport their prisoners off the mountain.

Police also arrested a seventh individual, Chronicle publisher Chris Braithwaite, who is challenging his arrest on grounds he was there doing his job as a reporter.

GMP’s intent to keep people off the site and the property it has under lease was deliberate and thorough, according to its project manager Charles Pughe, who also oversaw the posting.

“We cleaned out several stores,” he said, speaking of the no trespassing signs the company purchased. “We had to have so many of them.”

Mr. Pughe testified that the land was initially posted for safety and to keep hikers out of harm’s way. But he also noted that problems with people at the site began appearing sometime in October, as campers began to gather on the neighboring Nelson land.

Terms of the lease gave GMP authority to exclude or allow access to anyone the company chose, he said.

Mr. Pughe was off site the day the protesters were arrested. But under cross-examination by Ms. Michelsen, he said, he could tell from photographic evidence — including photographs taken by the arrested journalist — that the protesters were on GMP’s leased property at the time of their arrest.

He estimated the face of the turbine would be about 200 feet away from the Nelson boundary line.

From the moment he took the stand it was evident that Don Nelson was not going to be a friendly witness.

He gave mostly monosyllabic responses to the prosecutor’s questions, and when asked to read a document, he shrugged and said he didn’t have his glasses. That brought a query from the bench

“Need your glasses, Mr. Nelson?” asked Judge Maley.

“Don’t have them with me,” replied Mr. Nelson.

The prosecutor decided to try a different tack by asking the witness if he had given Dr. Holland permission to go on his property.

“My land is open. People come and go,” he replied. “I don’t invite or not invite. We don’t post it.”

When Ms. Michelsen’s turn came to ask the questions, Mr. Nelson said that Dr. Holland had come to see him about the boundary dispute, and that he had provided him with the coordinates that were in disagreement. According to his testimony, the dispute began years ago with the landowner who leased the land to GMP. At the time, the witness testified, there was a difference of roughly 420 feet.

For its final witness, the state put on the surveyor who recently bought out a surveying business in Derby Line that surveyed the Nelson property several years ago in hopes of resolving the boundary dispute.

Andrew Nadeau testified that the previous owner had surveyed the property in dispute in 2007, and that he had spent in excess of two weeks surveying it as well. But the surveyor who spent the longest time on the stand turned out to be the expert for the defense, Mr. Hannan.

Throughout his testimony, Mr. Hannan repeatedly testified there were fundamental mistakes in the 2007 survey — that affected the boundaries of lots leased by GMP.

He told jurors that in surveying the same ground, he found that markers had been inappropriately defined. He said there must be corroborating evidence to define a marker or monument that had been used in the past when the land was first surveyed. And such markers, he added, could be used to determine boundaries.

“When is a stone pile a stone pile or a monument?” he asked at one point.

Jurors already had heard from Mr. Nelson that surveying is not an exact science, and depends in part on the quality of surveys done in the past. Mr. Nelson noted that he and his neighbor had tried to settle survey discrepancies on their abutting lands through an agreement. Their boundary dispute was rekindled, however, when the agreement came unraveled.

Mr. Hannan testified that in surveying the land for the Nelsons, he found almost no markers on the ground that were left when the land was first surveyed in 1790. And he told the jurors that the monuments defined by the 2007 survey were inaccurate.

Closing arguments were short, lasting about five minutes apiece. Each attorney offered similar arguments to those they had made in their opening statements.

The verdict clearly took the defense and its supporters by surprise. After asking the judge to poll each juror for a verdict, Ms. Michelsen said she would be filing post trial motions. The court gave her ten days to submit them.

Prosecutor Baker said she would be requesting a restitution hearing, which means the state will try to convince the court to order the defendants to pay compensation to GMP.

The late hour verdict led the defendants to call off a press conference they had planned to hold at the conclusion of the trial.

In a press release Monday, Dr. Holland was quoted as saying:

“We are obviously disappointed with the verdict but respect the jury’s efforts. This is, and will continue to be, a complex case that rejects the simple and disingenuous offerings of Green Mountain Power. We will continue to educate Vermonters on the science and math of ridgeline wind-generated electricity.”

As Mr. Pughe was walking away from the courthouse, he said he hoped the verdict would make his job easier.

The remaining four defendants of the Lowell Six are: Ryan Gillard, 23, of Plainfield; Suzanna Jones, 50, of East Hardwick; Ann Morse, 48, of Craftsbury; and Eric Wallace-Senft, 46, of West Woodbury.

Peter Gebbie checks the readings on his new methane generator. Although he admits to being slow with computers, his wife, Sandra, said Mr. Gebbie turns out to be very good with the high-tech system. Photos by Joseph Gresser

copyright the Chronicle July 25, 2012

by Joseph Gresser

GREENSBORO — On Sunday morning Peter Gebbie had finished milking. The truck from the St. Albans co-op was loading and his hands were moving out to get the second cut of hay in.

But there was more for him to do. He and his wife, Sandra, headed toward a new building behind one of his barns. A sign on the door wisely warned against entering without hearing protection. Inside an engine roared.

Mr. Gebbie grabbed a clipboard and walked around the room checking readouts at various points along a complicated series of pipes.

He looked pleased at the results. “Eighty kilowatts,” he said. When they first started the generator about two weeks ago, it produced only 20 kilowatts.

When it is running at full speed the methane generator will produce 150 kilowatts of power.

Switching the generator on was the culmination of a process that began in Newport a little more than five years ago at a meeting sponsored by the state Agency of Agriculture. That meeting at the East Side Restaurant brought together dairy farmers who were interested in the process of turning manure and other organic matter into methane and eventually electricity.

At the time the Gebbies were milking 200 cows at Maplehurst Farm. The farmers who were getting into the electricity business had herds ten times the size of his.

On Sunday, Mr. Gebbie recalled that when he first started calling firms that design and install methane digesters he was turned away.

“The guys who sold digesters laughed at you,” he said, “unless you were at least a 1,000-cow farm.”

Mr. Gebbie persisted and eventually his calls started getting returned. He said that it seemed to him that the digester builders had worked their way through the big farmers and were ready to deal with someone his size.

While they were investigating the possibility of building a methane digester, the Gebbies doubled the size of their herd to 400 cows.

They were fortunate in having long before set up their barns with slatted floors through which the cows tread their manure and bedding. Gravity was enough to move this fuel into the digester, a round tank with a flexible cover.

Manure will produce methane with or without special equipment, but left to nature the volatile hydrocarbon will go into the atmosphere where it is a potent greenhouse gas.

Mr. Gebbie said he has heard it has a 24 to 25 times greater effect than carbon dioxide.

The Gebbies knew that things were going well when they saw the cover on the digester begin to balloon upwards. That indicated that gas was beginning to build up a head of pressure.

From the digester the gas goes into a scrubber which removes impurities to protect the engine of the generator. Mr. Gebbie said he is lucky because the gas produced by his manure is low in sulfur.

From the scrubber the gas goes to the generator or, if for some reason the generator is down for a while, through an upright pipe which is set up to burn extra gas to keep it from going into the atmosphere.

Once the manure is run through the digester, it could be spread on fields. The Gebbies have chosen to separate the liquids from the solids, spread the former and use the latter as bedding.

Levels need to be checked throughout the system. Peter Gebbie stands in front of the tank that cleans the methane before it is fed into the generator.

Sawmills used to give away sawdust, Mr. Gebbie noted. Today they use everything, and the price of bedding is a major cost of doing business. By producing his own bedding, Mr. Gebbie said, he can save as much as $20,000 a year.

Studies show the bedding produced by digesters reduces the incidence of mastitis and results in a lower somatic cell count, an indicator of a healthy cow, Mr. Gebbie said.

Of course, electricity is the main product of the system. The Gebbies have a contract to supply 150 kilowatts of power to the Hardwick Electric Company through the state’s Sustainably Priced Energy Enterprise Development (SPEED) program.

They are guaranteed a price of 14 cents a kilowatt-hour, well above the current market price of four cents. In addition they can sell Renewable Energy Credits (REC) through the Cow Power program started by Central Vermont Public Service and now under the auspices of Green Mountain Power.

Mr. Gebbie said the REC credits bring in an additional three to four cents a kilowatt-hour, less a small brokerage fee.

The system cannot operate at full capacity with only the manure produced on his farm, Mr. Gebbie said. To get to the full 150 kilowatts, he will need to find an outside source of carbon.

Typically that means a liquid such as whey, he said.

The 150-kilowatt limit is convenient in one regard. Power from the system can be moved on a simple single-phase line, the sort that typically serves a home.

Large scale generators on the farms in Franklin and Addison counties may generate more than a megawatt of power and require a very expensive three-phase service to move electricity off the farm.

In addition to power and bedding, the generator can also provide heat for the Gebbies’ home and milking parlor, and hot water, Mr. Gebbie said. The potential savings could be as great as those from the bedding, but they will require substantial investment in underground pipes, he added.

The digester cost “$1.5-million and climbing,” Mr. Gebbie said. Grants from the Natural Resources Conservation Service, Department of Energy and the state Department of Public Service’s Clean Energy Development Fund helped pay between half and three-quarters of the cost, he added.

“Most people would like to see things paid in five years,” Mr. Gebbie said.

A state trooper measures the length of the path the upended trailer’s wheels made in the roadside grass. Photos by Chris Braithwaite

copyright the Chronicle July 25, 2012

by Chris Braithwaite

The bottom section of a massive wind turbine bound for Green Mountain Power’s Lowell Mountain project tipped over Thursday, July 19, when it encountered a paving crew on Interstate 91.

The interstate was closed to southbound traffic for about three hours Friday morning while a crane retrieved the long white tube from the ditch and put it on a truck. The load made it to the job site on Route 100 south of Lowell Village just before noon on Friday, according to Phil Brooks, chief deputy of the Orleans County Sheriff’s Department.

The highly specialized tractor-trailer, owned by Lone Star Transportation, was in the passing lane, just north of the Orleans exit, when a left rear tire left the pavement and hit soft ground. Tire marks in the roadside grass indicate that what followed must have been an agonizingly slow catastrophe. The marks moved ever further from the pavement, ever lower down a gentle slope for 500 feet until they came to the trailer, its rear wheels overturned in the ditch. The tractor remained upright.

Speed was not a factor, State Trooper Rajesh Hailey said in his press release, and the driver, Jimmy Maddox of Gainesville, Texas, was not hurt.

Deputy Brooks said a crane was immediately dispatched from Desrochers Crane Service in Derby. It was unable to lift the tower section, but did assist a larger crane that arrived early Friday from Massachusetts, Mr. Brooks said. The interstate was closed at about 8 a.m. to allow space for the big crane to set up. Once that was done, Mr. Brooks said, it took only half an hour to recover the tower section. The highway was reopened at about 11 a.m.

A section of a wind turbine destined for Lowell Mountain rests in the ditch beside Interstate 91, just north of the Orleans exit.

Under the terms of its permit and state law governing overweight loads, Mr. Brooks said, Green Mountain Power’s contractor can use the highways from half an hour before sunrise to half an hour after sunset. However, loads must lay over in a “safe haven” between 7 and 8 a.m., noon and 1 p.m., and 4 to 5 p.m., Mr. Brooks said. Thursday’s load had just pulled out of the Coventry rest area when the accident occurred a few miles south, at 5:16 p.m.

Opponents of Green Mountain Power’s project, who held up a truck for about two hours on July 16, may continue to try and block the loads. The Mountain Occupiers, a group that has spearheaded several acts of civil disobedience in opposition to the project, scheduled a “civil disobedience training” in Craftsbury on Tuesday evening, July 24.

In an e-mail announcing the training, the group said: “As our powerful actions blocking the turbine trucks in Lowell showed, our cause can draw crowds, media, support, and even negotiate with the law. We don’t have to be bystanders to the destruction of our state. The time for action is now!”

Two protesters were arrested on July 24 after they stepped in front of a truck just before it turned into the Lowell site. They were cited for disorderly conduct, but released from custody after negotiations with police in which protesters agreed to clear the highway.

A Lowell wind project protester confronts State Police Corporal Dan Kerin as he tries to clear people off Route 100 Monday. Opponents of the Green Mountain Power project stopped a truck hauling a section of a turbine tower for about two hours before a compromise was negotiated with police. Our story starts on page nineteen. Photos by Chris Braithwaite

copyright the Chronicle July 18, 2012

by Chris Braithwaite

LOWELL — Though it was billed as just a “rally” and an opportunity for opponents of the Lowell Mountain wind project to “greet the turbines” as they arrived, Monday’s confrontation here turned into a brief but intense exercise in civil disobedience.

Gathering across Route 100 from the gate to the 21-turbine wind project at 9 a.m., protesters seemed content to wave signs and sing songs that condemned the project.

But when a truck hauling a long section of turbine tower finally appeared, a handful of protesters rushed into the road and stopped it. The quick arrest of two of them seemed only to draw others onto the highway in front of the idling truck.

Two Lamoille County deputies who had been hired by the project’s owner, Green Mountain Power, tried to “walk” the truck through the protesters, pushing them aside as they encountered them. But that proved to be a futile exercise that one demonstrator described later as “herding an amoeba.” Demonstrators flowed around the deputies to post themselves in front of the truck and bring it, once again, to a halt.

A group of Bread and Puppet performers had come to the scene in the Glover theater company’s distinctly painted bus, and their banners and fiercely beating drums brought fresh resolve to the protesters. As the two deputies and uniformed security guards at the site stood by in frustration, the crowd chanted “Shame on you!” and “Turn it back!” at the bright red truck and its hapless driver.

It took some time for the first State Police officer to arrive. And when Corporal Dan Kerin stepped out of his cruiser he encountered the same tactic that had confounded the deputies. Each protester in turn yielded to the corporal’s direct order to clear the road, then stepped back onto the pavement when he moved on to the next protester.

But State Police officers started to arrive in force, backed up by Orleans County deputies and officers with the U.S. Border Patrol, Fish and Wildlife and VTrans. Sets of hand restraints were brandished, and police dogs were sighted. An onlooker who scouted the area on his bicycle reported counting 22 law enforcement vehicles at the scene.

Lieutenant Kirk Cooper, commander of the State Police Derby barracks, stepped into the middle of the crowd of demonstrators and appealed for a peaceful conclusion.

“You’re perfectly entitled to voice your non-support,” he told the demonstrators. “But other people have to use this road. That’s where we get in the middle.

“I’m not gong to give you a lot a crap,” the lieutenant continued. If they didn’t move, he told the demonstrators, “we’re going to be forced to move you. I honestly don’t want to do that.”

The officer’s plea was seconded by one of the Lowell project’s most determined opponents, Don Nelson.

“We’ve made our point, boys,” Mr. Nelson said. “It’s time to back off.”

Some protesters heeded that advice, but some did not. Police, gathered in a clump just beside the idling truck, seemed ready to move. But leaders of the group were clearly anxious to avoid the confrontation that seemed moments away.

Pat Sagui, Steve Wright and Stephanie Kaplan, a lawyer who worked with opponents of the Sheffield wind project, talked to Lieutenant Cooper and Lamoille County Sheriff Roger Marcoux.

The deal they struck was that protesters would clear the highway if the sheriff released his two captives. They were a key leader of the opposition, Ira Powsner, and his younger brother, Jacob.

Ira Powsner of Ira is placed under arrest moments after stepping out onto Route 100 to stop a truck carrying part of a wind turbine.

After they were issued citations to appear in court on September 11 to answer charges of disorderly conduct, the brothers stepped out of the sheriff’s vehicle to the cheers of protesters. They sang “Happy Birthday” to Ira Powsner on the occasion of his twenty-sixth birthday.

The protesters returned to the side of the highway, the officers lined up to keep them there, and the truck finally hauled its long, white load through the gates and onto the construction site.

Watching from just inside that site, Lowell Selectman Richard Pion was less than pleased by the compromise.

“They ought to take half those people to jail,” he said. If police lacked the vehicles to get them there, he added, “they should go get a school bus.”

“They can demonstrate, but there’s no need of blocking traffic,” Mr. Pion said. “I thought this was the land of democracy,” he added, noting that a solid majority of Lowell citizens voted for the wind project.

Like most who tried to count the protesters, Mr. Pion estimated that there were about 100 of them. “That shows there’s only a handful that’s opposed to this,” he said.

When traffic finally started to move past the Green Mountain Power gate, it consisted only of a handful of heavy trucks that had been held up in both directions, and one Army truck driven by what appeared to be a National Guardsman. Most traffic was apparently able to drive around the obstruction on Mink Farm Road, which loops to the west of Route 100.

While Green Mountain Power’s chief executive, Mary Powell, was not visible at the scene, Vermont Electric Cooperative’s CEO, David Hallquist, was on hand. His utility has agreed to buy a small share of the project’s power, at cost.

Asked by a reporter if he was upset by the demonstration, Mr. Hallquist replied that he would have been disappointed if no one had shown up. Some of Mr. Hallquist’s remarks were recorded on film by his son, Derek Hallquist. The younger Hallquist is working with the documentary filmmaker Aaron Woolf of New York State, whose best-known work is King Corn.

In the hard hat and safety vest provided by Green Mountain Power, Mr. Woolf and his crew were easy to mistake for employees of the utility.

Standing just inside the work site, facing the demonstrators across the road, Mr. Woolf noted that if people stood on his side of the road, they were pro-wind. People on the other side of the road were anti-wind, he continued.

“And if you stand in the middle of the road, you get run over.”

The section of turbine tower had been held up on the highway for about two hours. And as demonstrators headed north on Route 100 after the rally, they quickly encountered a second section of tower on its way to the site, closely followed by a long, slender turbine blade.